BusinessWire India
Bengaluru (Karnataka) [India], September 2: On Lokta's count of the Reserve Bank of India's register, India has 8,315 non-banking financial companies registered in categories that lend. Just 458 of them are placed above RBI's base layer on the Rs 1,000 crore asset threshold alone. A further 7,739 sit in the base layer and carry many of the same obligations on a fraction of the budget.
Lokta today opened applications for Lokta Next 100, a programme that gives RBI-registered NBFCs with a loan book up to Rs 100 crore the technology to run that book after approval, with no platform fee for up to two years. Pure-play microfinance NBFCs are not eligible.
"Most small lenders end up running two companies," said Chandramouli C S, co-founder and CEO of Lokta. "There is the company on paper. And there is the company people actually use, which runs on phone calls, WhatsApp and spreadsheets, with the founder approving things all day."
Lokta estimates that a compact in-house lending technology team, with product and engineering leadership, developers, QA, DevOps and security, and integration capability, can cost Rs 2 crore to Rs 3 crore a year before the lender has put a single loan through the system.
"The licence was the hard part. The lending technology should not be," said Chandramouli. "An experienced lender should be able to put capital into the book, into people, customers, risk and collections, not into rebuilding a servicing stack. Every credit and money decision stays with the lender."
There is no starter tier. Lenders get servicing, a loan product studio, loan-level accounting, regulatory and investor reporting, portfolio analytics and early warning, collections and recovery, partner management for Lending Service Providers, APIs and bureau reporting. Maker-checker sits on every change, which means one person makes it and another approves it, and the record keeps both.
Migration runs in parallel with the lender's existing system or manual process. The lender cuts over only when opening balances reconcile line by line, and Lokta stays through the first configured policy version and its reconciliation in production. The book and its records stay the lender's: data is hosted in India, exportable at any point in the term, and never used to train models for anyone else.
AI in the platform proposes. The deterministic core, the rule-based part that runs on the lender's own policy, decides every change. The AI cannot post to the ledger. It is opt-in, priced on actual use, and can be turned off at any time. Lokta points to the report of RBI's FREE-AI Committee of 13 August 2025, which sets out as a guiding principle that "Entities deploying AI systems should be accountable for decisions of the AI systems, regardless of the level of autonomy of the systems". The report is not a direction, and the Reserve Bank does not endorse Lokta or any other vendor.
There is no platform fee for up to 24 months. Billing begins at the earlier of the loan book staying above Rs 100 crore for two consecutive months, or the 24-month term ending. After that the rate is 1 basis point a month on the book, Rs 1,000 a month for every Rs 1 crore, or about 0.12% a year, plus taxes. On a Rs 100 crore book that is Rs 12 lakh a year.
Two one-time charges apply, Rs 1 lakh for migration and Rs 50,000 for bank integration, both plus taxes. A fresh licence has nothing to migrate, and Lokta waives the integration charge for it.
Lokta starts two lenders a month, in the order applications arrive, so that every go-live is assisted rather than self-serve.
"Our revenue should grow when the lender's book does," said Chandramouli. "We are waiting to get paid until the book can pay."
The programme is open to RBI-registered NBFCs today, and Lokta plans to extend it to lenders elsewhere in Asia-Pacific and in Africa in the coming weeks.
Lokta is opening the programme ahead of the Global Fintech Fest, which brings the industry to Mumbai next week.
Applications are open at lokta.ai/next-100
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